Counter-Memories in Iranian Cinema

by Matthias Wittmann (Editor), Ute Holl (Editor)

Overview

Farīd ad-Dīn-e ʿAṭṭār’s Persian folk tale The Conference of the Birds relates the quest by thousands of pilgrim birds for an ideal king, the mythical bird called Sīmorgh. At the end of the quest, the surviving birds recognise that the longed-for king is nothing other than the reflection of their own existence. But what about those other birds that were not able to become part of the final representation? This groundbreaking book calls them ‘counter-memories’; memories that are barred from hegemonic history, but are, nevertheless present in cinematic forms. Due to the strategic and artistic interventions of a range of Iranian filmmakers, such as Abbas Kiarostami and Shahram Mokri, Ali Hatami and Tahmineh Milani, Kianoush Ayari and Rakshan Banietemad, the history of post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema is also structured by counter-memories, with the potential to destabilise officially fabricated success stories of revolution, war and sacred defence. Counter-Memories in Iranian Cinema establishes a new framework for understanding the tensions between censorship and resistance, helping to carve out resistant points of remembering both within and outside state-controlled cinema.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474479769
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	07/17/2023
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Dr Matthias Wittmann is a researcher on media (especially film), curator, and writer. He was Research Associate and Chief Assistant at the Seminar for Media Studies (University of Basel) and Visiting Professor in Vienna. He has just finished a book about the Octopus (Die Gesellschaft des Tentakels, 2021) and is currently writing a book on Martyrographies in Iranian Cinema.

Professor Ute Holl is Professor for Media Aesthetics at Basel University

Table of Contents

Introduction - Matthias Wittmann and Ute Holl

Part I: An Archaeology of Possible Futures

1. The Incomplete: Film, Politics, and Remembering the Past - Tara Najd Ahmadi

2. The Hidden Half, or the Temporal and Collective Politics of Counter-Memory - Sara Saljoughi

3. Counter-Investigations. On Matchboxes, Black Boxes and other Forgotten Futures - Chowra Makaremi and Emmanuel Alloa

Part II: Material Matters – Memory, Accessibility, translation

4. An Archaeology of Access: Materiality, Historiography, and Iranian Cinema - Blake Atwood

5. Black Seals: Missive from Iran’s National Music - Negar Mottahedeh

6. Different Time, Different Space: Filmic Forms of Counter-Memory in Abbas Kiarostami's Koker Trilogy - Ute Holl

Part III: Interstices. Niches. Impure Memories

7. Towards an Impure Memory. An Archaeology of Counter-Memories through Telescoping Lenses - Matthias Wittmann

8. Seeking Love in the Interstices: Acousmatic Listening as Counter-Memory in Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin (2008) - Michelle Langford

9. Spiritual Counter-Memories of the War: Mohammad Ali Ahangar’s Recent Contributions to the Sīnemā-ye Defāʿ-ye Moqaddas - Viktor Ullmann

Part IV: Transgenerational Gaps and Transmissions

10. Filmfarsi as Counter-memory - Pedram Partovi

11. A Shadow for Invisible Films. A Way to Break the Monopoly of Image Production in Iran - Shahram Mokri

12. At the End of a Century (1996) - Bahram Beyzaie (translated by Amir Roshan)

Editorial Reviews

This collected volume is a vital cinematic intervention in master narratives of modern Iran from the 1960s to 2014. Based on the premise that films can work as a counterforce to official histories of institutions, societies, and politics, the book convincingly posits cinema as counter-history. Foregrounding the plurality of histories, memories, material culture, and audiovisual archives, the brilliant chapters in this volume boldly attest to how cinematic memoryscapes and afterimages make ‘hidden history’ visible and tangible. Scholars and students of Iranian cinema, media, and modern history interested in going beyond conventional understandings of film and history will appreciate this volume’s theorizing of film as a site of counter-memory production.

Golbarg Rekabtalaei

The authors examine the styles of several major films—including works by Kiarostami, Ayyari, and Hatami—in relation to the politics of representation and what is remembered, forgotten, distorted, or excluded. This is a thought-provoking, insightful, and informative collection of theoretical and philosophical essays about the impact of Iranian films on the collective memory of the audiences.

Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa